After lurking around for a while, carefully combing every thread in this sub-forum, downloading redshirt (which works amazingly well with wine), compiling the otp.cc posted in one of the threads and de-redshirting the MP3, I'm now stuck.

Removing "ONETIME" from the readme and de-redshirting it resulted in garbage. Using the otp tool with the key file and the readme as input file resulted in garbage still, as did using the redshirted original.

I understand that I only need half the key file as it is twice as large as the whole of book2. I also understand how the otp program works (although the variable naming is horrible and comments would have been nice). I even understand how OTPs work and how to recognise a valid JPEG or MP3 file in hex view.

What I do not understand, however, is how to decrypt the files successfully. I've tried a number of different offsets (16, 32, etc, size of the readme.txt, size of the HTML file, size of the first JPEG -- yes, even 0) for the key, but the otp tool still only spits out garbage (read: the output never results in something with a valid JPEG header).

What offset am I supposed to start with for the first JPEG? Is there a better way to do this than brute-forcing?

I guess I could write a shell script to find the right offset by running hexdump after each attempt and looking for the header, but there has to be a better way than to bruteforce a 13.7 MB file.

Am I even remotely close? I can't find any relevant information and Google isn't exactly a good search tool when your terms are variants of "Uplink" and "book 2" (especially if you consider that it now "helps" you by looking for "link up" and the like as well). Not to mention the lack of info on the forum...

I'm at a loss here...

EDIT: Also note that the "one-click" decrypter isn't downloadable anymore, so that's not an option either.